FACULTY
PERSPECTIVES

Organizational Constraints and the Collegial
Process

Editor's Note: In April 1995, Jacqueline L. Zeff
submitted her letter of resignation as Dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences(CAS) at the University of Michigan, Flint Campus. What follows is
the text of her letter and her final remarks to the faculty of the
College.

From Dr. Zeff's Letter of Resignation:

In
recent months, organizational constraints have seriously eroded the
collegial process and are preventing the College of Arts and Sciences from
fulfilling its responsibilities at a level of excellence and humaneness I
and my colleagues have come to expect. I can no longer participate in this
climate of decision-making and therefore resign my position as Dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences effective July 1, 1995, when I will assume
full-time faculty status at U-M-Flint as Professor of English, with
tenure.

Remarks to College of Arts and Sciences Faculty

I'd like to use my last official "report" to share with you some of the
issues that led to my decision to resign as your Dean. But first I want to
thank the more than fifty people who called, stopped by, e-mailed and
wrote notes to express their support for my leadership and concern for my
welfare. One colleague wasn't sure whether I had "lost my senses, or
perhaps found them!" In fact, I believe that as an academic community we
may indeed be in danger of losing one sense--the sense of what it means to
be a University. But first, let me make clear what are NOT my reasons for
this decision. I did NOT resign because I have fallen out of love with my
job; or because the "work" was completed; or because I lost an argument,
or my energy for battle. In a 1987 commencement address, A. Bartlett
Giamatti (then President of Yale and soon-to-be Commissioner of Baseball)
reminded us that:

"A college or University is an institution where
financial incentives to excellence are absent, where the product line is
not a unit or an object but rather a value-laden and life-long process;
where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or market share but
intellectual excellence; not profit or proprietary rights but the free
good of knowledge; not efficiency of operation but equity of treatment;
not increased productivity in economic terms but increased intensity of
thinking about who we are and how we live and about the world around us.
In such an institution, leadership is much more a rhetorical than a fiscal
or "strategic" act. While never denigrating the day-to-day, never scorning
the legitimate and difficult chores of management, never pretending that
efficiency is useless or productivity irrelevant, leadership in such an
institution must define institutional shape, that is, define its standards
and purposes--define the coherent, sustainable, daring, shared effort of
learning that will increase a given community's freedom, intellectual
excellence, human dignity.

Such assertions of leadership--by
speech, by deed, through decisions large and small--are the essential acts
of institutional definition."

A Free and Ordered Space: The Real
World of the University, W.W. Norton, 1988, p. 36-37.

In recent
months, I have experienced and witnessed administration actions that run
counter to our shared effort of learning, and that are, in my judgment,
anti-intellectual, anti-collegial and anti-person. Our beautiful new
library has become a site for clandestine meetings between staff who are
fearful that their interactions might be reported to other staff.
Employees who willingly and regularly extend their workdays, without any
expectation of compensation, now are ordered to remain at their desks.
Barriers of power and economic advantage have been intensified by the
introduction of identification badges for staff while keeping other
employees of the University exempt. And statements made in public
colloquia are secretly tape recorded and used to discredit colleagues.

But it is the recent budget reallocation "exercise" that has surfaced
for me the real threats to our institutional definition. Last week, I and
several colleagues from the "Understanding Hate" Committee attended a
conference in Chicago whose purpose was "to bring together people in the
academy who care about what kind of 'citizens'--that is, 'participants in
the community'--our students will become as a result of what we teach
them." What do our decision-making behaviors teach our students? One of
the conference speakers, Dr. David Matthews, President of the Kettering
Foundation, helped me see that higher education offers the public not just
what it knows, but "ways of knowing," processes of thought that have never
been as sorely needed by our community as they are in the 1990s. Two such
processes that pertain to our current budget situation are the use of the
imagination to anticipate consequences and the ability to consider means
and ends at the same time. The budget reduction "scenarios" mandated by
the Chancellor and implemented by the Provost defy those processes. Only a
failure of imagination would order CAS to explain, for example, that every
cut in our adjunct faculty salary line of $100,000 would result in a loss
of $444,150 in revenue to the University and the cancellation of 46
classes. Only a failure in imagination can account for the cautionary note
that as we cut faculty, and therefore classes, we should "remember our
intent to balance the budget while maximizing quality, access and
success." (Memo to Academic Deans and Directors, March 9, 1995)

Nor
does the proposed strategy for addressing the anticipated "shortfall"
demonstrate the ability to consider means and ends at the same time. To
prepare each scenario, we have been asked to identify "FTE, rank, grade,
etc." The debasement of language in these terms obscures the faces of
full-time untenured faculty, long-time adjunct faculty and the deletion of
new hires vital to sustaining, let alone expanding, programs to meet
student needs. In meetings and through written communications, the faculty
have asked for explanations and information that would substantiate the
need for such drastic and unreflective actions. We are still waiting for
answers. Dr. Richard Weber, Economic Consultant to CAS, concluded in his
1994 analysis of the financial statements of U-M-Flint: "The analysis
shows University of Michigan-Flint in good financial health." We have been
told there is no time for thoughtful program review. There is no time to
coordinate allocations with the vision that might emerge from the academic
planning effort currently under way. There is no time or opportunity to
consider alternative responses, such as reducing or eliminating ancillary
functions that neither educate students nor generate revenue. Nor is
anyone invited to think through the negative effects on BOTH the person
forced to inscribe the name on the list as well as on the person targeted
for layoff. Important non-base funded initiatives to promote diversity in
the curriculum and the faculty, to enhance general education and to
internationalize the campus are ignored. On the other hand, we have been
encouraged to consider increasing class sizes, re-evaluating sabbatical
policies, eliminating support for faculty with administrative or program
development responsibilities. Fundamental academic principles of civil
debate, analysis, reflection and revision have been waived by an
administratively created sense of urgency. On March 22, 1995, the CAS
faculty unanimously passed a motion requesting information from the
Provost and Chancellor and called for an immediate freeze on
administrative hiring. To date, three national searches for administrative
positions are continuing.

As a first principle of academic life,
faculty govern. Not because they are inherently better at governance but
because the institution's primary purpose is teaching and learning which
faculty ARE inherently better at!

Ultimately, the across-the-board
budget reallocations which we are facing are not about money, but about
reconstructing the University; they are about treating education as a cost
center without considering it as a revenue center. But most of all, the
reallocations ignore the responsibility that we as educators must abide by
as well as the physician, "first, do no harm." A colleague once pointed
out to me that in the University, the curriculum may be the soul, but the
budget is the conscience. Recent events and the climate of decision making
I have described have made me follow my conscience.